Re: Was Secession Legal? Part 26
>Nice try, Gary, but the person being removed from the State of Pennsylvania is not a “citizen”, he/she is “property”.
You are overlooking two important questions. First, how do you know that he or she is property? Has any competent legal authority made that determination? Was the mere allegation that a person was property sufficient to establish the fact that he or she was property?
In most cases, allegation was sufficient unto itself, but many slave hunters also had documentation in the form of a bill of sale.
In other words, if I alleged that you were my fugitive slave, you think that should have been sufficient “in most cases”? In what cases would or should it not have been sufficient? If I produced a bill of sale covering my purchase of a slave named “George,” and then said that you were my fugitive slave, George, would you agree that I had provided proof, or a sufficient amount of evidence, to establish that you were my fugitive slave, George? What if I said that I had no bill of sale because I had owned you since birth. Would my claim that I had owned you since birth be sufficient to establish that I had no obligation to provide evidence to that effect?
Did the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 law provide that I had to provide documentation in the form of a bill of slave to demonstrate my ownership of you before removing you from the state? If so, to whom did I have to provide this documentation? Could the sovereign state of Pennsylvania demand that you produce this documentation?
>If you had lived in Pennsylvania at that time, was my claim that you were my property sufficient to give me the legal right to enslave you?
A court of competent jurisdiction would decide that question and, if you provided a proper bill of sale, would decide in your favor-or should.
And what is the competent jurisdiction? I”ve come from Virginia to Pennsylvania and have taken you by force from the streets of Gettysburg. Can you be complled to appear in any court before removing me to Virginia? Is a Pennsylvania court a court of competent jurisdiction? If not, why doesn’t the sovereign state of Pennsylvania have enough sovereignty to decide that Pennsylvania courts are courts of competent jurisdiction in deciding on matters taking place in Pennsylvania?
Do the chambers of a federal fugitive slave commissioner constittue a court of competent jurisdiction? If so, then why did not the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 prescribe that the commissioner could demand that you produce a bill of sale to prove that you had ever owned some slave — any slave — name George?
>Second, even if he or she was property, where was he or she property? In Pennsylvania? How can that be the case, and Pennsylvania still be a “free state”? Even slave state courts routinely ruled that a slave brought into a free state voluntarily was not a slave there — and if the (former) slave ran away, the (former) owner had no legal right of recovery.
And Justice Taney of the Supreme Court disagreed.
Theat is new to me, and I’m sure it would have been news to them as well. In what case? Not DRED SCOTT v SANDFORD, for the slave Dred Scott had never been taken into a free state. – Gary Charbonneau
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
